“Well I’m glad to hear that, at least, Caspar,” Giraud said. “The situation’s
difficult enough as it is.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Lang said confidently.
At Kleippur’s residence, Kleippur and the others returned to the Council Chamber
and took from its place of concealment inside a cabinet the seeing vegetable
that the Wearer had left as a gift before returning to the large dragon beyond
the sky. Dornvald relit the violet Lumian lantern that enabled the vegetable to
see, and Thirg pressed the button that would open another eye within the dragon.
All in the room waited, their eyes fixed expectantly on the magic window.
In a cabin up in the Orion, Osmond Periera and Malcom Wade sat surrounded by
notes and papers, concentrating intently on the sentences appearing on the
computer screen in front of them and making occasional responses via keyboard.
The screen was showing the attempts of Zambendorf, who was elsewhere in a sealed
room with no means of communication to the outside apart from a nonswitchable,
hard-wired terminal, to divine the contents of closed envelopes selected blind
by Periera, guess random sequences of numbers and ESP cards, and describe
drawings made on the spur of the moment by both the testers. The use of only a
narrow set of predefined mnemonic codes to communicate, would, Periera and Wade
had agreed, effectively eliminate the possibility of their giving hints and
clues unwittingly.
Actually it made no difference because Joe Fellburg had bugged their cabin,
which they hadn’t thought to check, and they both talked too much. They also
hadn’t thought to check whether the sealed room had been unsealed and occupied
by someone pretending to be Zambendorf . . . such as Thelma and Clarissa taking
turns to operate the terminal while the other stayed around for company. Any
question of cheating was, after all, unthinkable; why would Zambendorf need to
cheat if he was genuine?
Although progress had been painfully slow, the results that Periera and Wade had
been getting were tantalizingly encouraging—enough, in fact, to have kept them
shut away for the best part of several days. But that, of course, was the whole
idea.
In the team’s day suite, Zambendorf was pacing restlessly back and forth while
Otto Abaquaan and Joe Fellburg pored over the latest Terran-Taloid transcripts
from the duplicate transmogrifier concealed in Arthur’s meeting room. The device
Zambendorf had donated to the Taloids before returning to the Orion was a joint
effort—constructed by Joe Fellburg with the aid of assembly diagrams and
programs donated by Leon Keyhoe, parts supplied by Dave Crookes, and a terminal
assembly stolen by Abaquaan from the Orion’s electronics stores. It not only
provided printouts of the screens that had been presented to Giraud’s linguists,
but also a complete audio record of the comments exchanged between the Terran
politicians by radio.
“The main problem with today’s high-technology society is that we allow
politicians to run it instead of people equipped with the wherewithal to
understand it,” Zambendorf muttered irritably. “Their mentalities are still in
the nineteenth century. How can they hope to manage complex economies when
they’re not competent to run a yard-sale. What can they do that requires even a
smattering of knowledge or intellect?”
Drew West shrugged from a comer. “People let them get away with it,” he said.
“If people are gonna elect turkeys to tell them what to do, then the people are
gonna have problems. You can’t blame the turkeys. The Constitution never
guaranteed smart government; it guaranteed representative government. And it
works—that’s what we’ve got.”
“The trouble with the damn system is that it selects for the skills needed to
get elected, and nothing else . . . which requires only an ability to fool a
sufficient number of people for just long enough to get the votes,” Zambendorf
grumbled. “Unfortunately the personal qualities necessary for attaining office
are practically the opposite of those demanded by the office itself. A test that
you can only pass by cheating can’t possibly select honest people, can it? You’d
think that would be obvious enough, Drew, and yet—”
“Call coming in from Camelot now,” Abaquaan said over his shoulder as Fellburg
reached out to the touchpanel of the communications terminal beside them.